Thursday, May 21, 2015

mouth music (false phonemes)


























Continuo on the Tellus audio cassette magazine's issue #22 - False Phonemes: from 1988.

"Extraordinary cassette curated by Ellen Zweig - who incidentaly was working on an adaptation of Raymond Roussel’s ‘Impressions of Africa’ at the time, hence maybe the two Remko Scha tracks being excerpts from this project. ‘False Phonemes’ is based on computerized human voice – ‘cybernetic fleshy abstractions’, says Zweig. So electronicaly processed voices abound in all tracks, complete with drum machine and synthesizers, or merely sound effects. Mark Rudolph succeeds in melting heavily processed enigmatic voices into a coherent ‘voicescape’. The kyrie in Alice Shields’ Mass is so unexpected it’s almost shocking in the context of avantgarde. The Paul Lansky track is a computerized party chatter morphing into an electronic hymn. Ron Kuivila is electroacoustic music from human voice samples. John Cage is reading through his beloved Thoreau once again – multitracked low, hushed and inscrutable voices."

Entire cassettography of Tellus available at Ubuweb!